So a friend and I have now tried Escape from Dol Guldor 3 times and been soundly trounced. We won our first game but only, as we realized later by breaking a few rules... had two Gandalfs at once taking out the Nazgul, and allowed Eleanor's action to cancel Ungoliant's Spawn's "when revealed" effect. Since then, watching our play more closely, we have barely made it through the first part of the quest, if that.

We play custom decks, me with Spirit and Lore (Beravor, Eleanor, and Eowyn or Beravor, Glorfindel, and Eowyn), and my friend with Leadership and Tactics (Theodred, Thalin, and Legolas or Theodred, Aragorn, and Legolas). The main issue I found tonight that worked against us was that we didn't realize "when revealed" effects on cards attached to objectives during Setup were not effective. But even with that corrected, I think we would have gotten soundly thrashed.

Has anyone played with this arrangement of heroes and associated decks and beat this scenario? We are pretty discouraged at this point, but we know there has got to be a way to play this scenario and beat it as a 2-player game.

Regards,

Bene

I should clarify... we have played EfDG 4 times overall, the first being the win that was not valid.

1st question: are you beating the first two scenarios CONSISTENTLY with a good result??? if not, try again those.... also try different combos and decks for the first two and get a feel, what works best for you,but by playing correctly...

else: just try and try... it took me 10 times, until I got the hang of the thrid scenario... it's not a game with a win button, it's supposed to be hard.... at least the last scenario...

I've yet to beat it, despite repeated attempts. If you fathom out how to do so, please let us know.

I never win solo.Maybe is impossible but i heard some players manage to do that.

But 2 players we play many times and never lose. But still interesting quest. Carrock in opinion is more hard for 2 players game.

We have a 45% winrate in our Group for this scenario.

But that is for 3 players.

We have never beat it with only Two Players yet, but we've been close a couple of times. Really really close.

Then again... we play it "the hard way".

/wolf

I gotten stomped a few times in two-player games and walked all over it in a four-player game.

GhostWolf69 said:

What is mean you play the hard way?????

Glaurung said:

Interesting. I've been holding back from EfDG because I keep hearing how hard it is (I want to be mentally ready for it). Of course, you and I see differently with regard to Carrock Glaurung, I'd rate that quest as 2nd easiest after Passage for 2-player, have never come close to losing vs Carrock and this includes times when I've accidentally quested too much and triggered stage 2 with like 2 allies total between the two parties . Closest call was probably getting a Hill Troll out during stage 2, threat was going up until I got the Forest Snare on the HT. I've won with and without Grimbeorn as well, he is nice if you can get him (Steward of Gondor!!!) but by no means necessary. Mainly because the Unique Trolls, even when they engage all at once, well, they attack for 6 but have zero nasty side effects like the Hill Troll, so you can throw you Snowborn Scouts to them without a care in the world (vs HT you'd get +5 threat as well).

It took us awhile to beat the Anduin quest, but we rebalanced our decks, favoring Spirit and Tactics, and it became regularly winnable.

Yes, not expecting that we would win EfDG every time, but we would like a win sometime soon. We're going to recover our morale with a lark down Anduin. After that we thought about doing a transcript of our next few games to get some critique from other players. Playing with other folks via Skype sounds really interesting (noticed that in another Forum thread), just to learn different styles or thoughts about the play action. But hopefully an annotated game would be quickly reviewable and provide some helpful feedback.

Interesting to hear that others have not had success with this scenario. Nice to know we aren't the only ones.

~Bene

My roomate and I beat it about 1 out of every 5 times. We feel that to be fairly "consistent" for Dol Guldur.

Dam said:

Dam said:

Before the Carrock come for us the best quest was Dlo-Guldor. All my games i use to play against Dol-Guldor i never lose. I mean 2 players game. On that moment me and My friend was really sceptic about this game. Cose it was to easy. When HFG come dificulty 4 we was so disappointed so already almost want to quit play this game.

I have big experience with Magic and Lotr tcg Decipher. My friend also big experience with Magic. And we feel like hey what up??? We cannot lose the most difficult quest at all???? We like the game but we need challenge!!!! Than Carrock come. OK I play and win easy solo. Than we play with my firend and We LOSE!!!!! First 2 players game for 3 months!!!!Ok next one wi win. And next one again lose!!!! With Dol-Guldor never!!!! Than we get Rhosgobel this one is quite specific.You need a certain deck for win.

Osgiliath is most cool quest for now is really interesting, you never know how game can change every turn.

Than come Stand and fight (errata) and i say my self: hey man they trying to make it harder so good good!!!!

And boom Emyn Muil Difficult 4. Why??? But im happy cose not only me complain about this now.

Actually you should look on this one. I think is amazing. this is a fan quest but look really promising:

http://boardgamegeek.com/article/7636369#7636369

This kind of product we should to get from FFG!!!!

When you guys can beat lvl 4 quests easily with regularity then you should look at moving up the ladder to lvl 6 if you can still beat all the 4's and 6 a good ***** of the time then go to the 7's and 9 . I kinda have a method of stripping my decks apart choosing my heroes and cherry picking the cards I want on order to build the deck. It tends to give me a well rounded deck. I am at the point now though where i know what cards need to be in the deck for my play style. So this method is probably going to be only attempted every other expansion. it is getting to the point where my deck pretty much controls the game and every one aids me when i need it.

I do need to change my play style though so that I can attempt new challenges.

Just a note: Dol Guldur IS beatable solo, but you need a lot of luck. I did it 2 weeks ago with a Spirit/Leadership deck constructed from a single Core Set and the first three adventure packs. The heroes were Eowyn, Frodo and Imrahil, and I used a lot of the Rohan allies that die easily to combo with Imrahil.

As I said, I was pretty lucky - Frodo was captured (optimal), I had a second-turn Steward of Gondor and an early Northern Tracker. It was still a very close game, I had to use both A Light in the Darks to keep the Nazgul at bay a little longer and almost lost once Ungoliant's Spawn joined the team, but I eventually managed to finish the quest with the Spawn munching away at my allies and my threat level at 47.

I agree that the quest scales extremely badly. It's super-hard solo and very easy with 4 players if everyone knows what they are doing. Even with 2 players, my girlfriend and I very rarely lose.

Trantor said:

With two players we have a win percentage of slightly more than 50% - and that's using fairly unoptimized decks. We never tried with more players yet, but I can guess that it gets progressively easier.

Trantor said:

yes you right. But i thig if i will have chance to play 4 players this quest i will captured 2 heroes instead 1. Will be more fair.

I almost had it once, but have not come close since. I was on the third quest card, but an untimely appearance by the Spawn (as a shadow card, no less) wrecked everything. I stopped playing it for a while, considering that the card pool at the time did not allow for a realistic chance to win against it. I'm looking into making a deck with a number of the newer cards and see how much it helps.

We've played all the scenarios 3 player and had never lost until Osgiliath,. We lost the first two times we played that. Beat it on the third try!

2 Player we've won just about all though we've lost to really tough draws on JdtA a couple times and HfG once (3 signs of Gollum and 3 Hunters by turn 2!). We've not played EfDG or MaO 2 player yet.

I've won solo on all I've tried but EfDG. Still need to tackle Osgiliath solo.